Ask HN: What is your viable aka money making startup or side project idea?

I hate to tell you, but this isn't a good way to go about looking for ideas. Either:

A.) The people who have ideas don't want to share them, especially for a nebulous offer to compensate them a "good amount at [your] discretion". Is that $100 or $100,000? It's a worse gamble than the lottery, especially if nothing is in writing beforehand.

B.) The idea should be the least of your concerns. You're looking in the wrong place for the wrong thing.

Now that I've said the harsh words, let me try to help you out.

You seem like you have your head on your shoulders with respect to tech. That's a good thing. Who you need to partner with, then, is a salesman or marketing guru. This needs to be someone with business connections or the tenacity to pound the pavement until sales start rolling in. This must be a partnership, and not one entered into lightly. Think of it as a marriage: if you join to the wrong person, it will be painful for a very long time.

I'm a good programmer. I've built a lot of websites and tools across many different technologies, and I am currently in my 3rd year of PhD studies in CS. My first business failed because I had a "If I build it, they will come" mindset. Nobody came, and I lost $12,000. Another project of mine failed because, although the idea was ahead of its time, I did not have the business contacts in that field necessary to reach critical mass. A startup that I worked for also folded because they did not have a valid monetization strategy.

What I am trying to say is that the idea is a very small part of the equation. Execution, marketing, and networking are just as important as the technology, but you haven't mentioned those at all. A good idea will not get you where you want to go, just as tires will not move you across town. It is a part of the solution, and an important part, but there are other important parts, too.

My unsolicited advice to you is this: spend more time looking for business partners that you can trust with your future, both in terms of skill set, business acumen, and financial integrity. Then, together with them, develop the idea that you want to pursue. With the right team, you can be very successful. By yourself, you might as well try playing the lottery. In fact, the lottery will be quicker and will probably cost a lot less.

1) 99 Designs for Voice Acting.

Particularly for videogames / commercial video production, there's a lot of small parts that are strictly scripted, and where I'd imagine it's inefficient to spend a lot of time searching through voice actors' portfolios when what you really want is just to hear a good take.

2) WordPress-native, content-aware, publisher-friendly analytics

There's a big gap in analytics software for analytics that are tightly integrated with the CMS, and focus on providing insights about content, not just pages. The same piece of content appears in many forms, in many places across the site, for varying lengths of time. How does content length affect bounce rate? How long should content stay in a particular slot before it starts getting diminishing returns on traffic? How much traffic do articles with a particular tag typically get within their first week since publishing vs their first year?

Most publishers would be totally unable to answer those questions without a month-long data integrations effort from multiple sources (assuming they've done some of the setup work with something like Google Analytics event-tracking to have the data in the first place), even though it has big implications for everything from site layout to editorial guidelines to long-tail traffic potential for content around a topic.

3) Street team marketplace, dynamic printing, and verification system as an app.

An elance-for-street-team-members site that could let companies post 'missions' for people in any major metro or college campus who want to do street team tasks, who have signed up through an app. Flyer posting, handouts, chalking, etc. Street teamers verify their work with the app through a combination of photos and location-tracking during the time they mark they're working on a mission.

Companies could optionally use the marketplace's software to create the flyers or handouts, which allows for the marketplace to both make sure it's print-shop ready and provide dynamic URLs / QR codes unique for each flyer or handout, for additional verification and results tracking.

Ok, here's an idea:

Make a content channel which is for nothing but curated ad content. In other words, advertisers only get to post their ad if it is judged entertaining or informative enough to count as content. Of course, they pay for accepted content. The audience is attracted by the interesting ads.

This channel would compete with some aspects of YouTube (those ads that are interesting enough to get 10 million YouTube views). The idea is that by providing a curated mix of ads with no repetitive play, that it would be entertaining enough to be an entertainment destination on its own. Instead of a channel creating or purchasing interesting content to attract an audience, the curation and presentation of the ads is the value which is added.

In the ideal case, it becomes a 24/7 channel of nothing but superbowl ads. Wouldn't you or some of your friends want to watch that?

Most of the people here are likely to be techies capable of bringing the good, feasible ideas to light themselves

Unfortunately I think you've over-specified yourself out of a discussion here. What ideas do you have and why have you ruled them out?

"A better search engine than Amazon" isn't an idea, how would you do it. What technologies would you use? Amazon was built at a time when computing wasn't as powerful as it is now and iterated on and hacked on. If you started from scratch what would you do? Once you've done that how would you monetize it?

Same with the porn search. Where's the idea? You've given us the headlines but not the articles!

I don't want to come across as harsh, just give your discussion a bit of a bump -- and my good ideas are my ideas - I'm working on them already!

A) A simple financial options trader for hot ideas.AKA - trading weekly options on Netflix, or facebook. $ could also be pooled so smaller than 1 option positions could be taken. I know a lot about finance and could help you make this tool.

B) An email sorting tool. Assigning importance scores to emails and then having the email predict where you want incoming emails to be in your list (higher scores = near the top)

C) A tool for entering your course list, and having the page find all of the cheapest markets to buy your books from. Then transacting the total deal from one webpage.

Message me if you want me to discuss further any of these ideas. These are rather simple ideas that could make a good side project. If we actually get something done, I have much bigger projects.